More on the 'learner voice'

South Essex College has developed a range of social networking tools that allow students to share experiences and ideas regarding their teaching and learning. Students can create blogs, post status updates using an in-house Twitter type application (Seek), vote in online polls and post messages in online forums.

These tools are becoming increasingly popular amongst students. During the last academic year, for example, 25855 messages were posted in 1023 topics in 245 forums. Since the start of the current academic year students have posted over 8000 messages in the forums.

Students here hardly need encouragement to make their views known. We are though planning to issue a number of netbooks to students to enable them to access the College’s social networking tools via the wireless network. Informal soundings to date have indicated that we will not be short of volunteers when it comes to allocating netbooks to students.